It wasn’t enough for me, and never has been, to simply accept a doctrine of a church on the basis of someone saying so or someone saying that they had experienced it, an anecdotal proof. While I have walked in faith on some things~~not yet seeing them as proven doctrines of the Bible~~I have continued to search for the truth of God’s Word. And such it is with the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Spirit being a second or subsequent event in the life of the believer.
It is because of two evangelical/Calvinistic believers on AOL that I have finally come to understand that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a second, subsequent event in the life of the believer. These two AOL members presented two doctrines (which immediately brought a check to my spirit):
1. Salvation for OT saints is received in a different way than salvation for NT (and subsequent) saints
2. One can be saved and not be part of the family of God.
I knew that neither statement could be correct and it was in my studies and meditations upon these issues that God revealed the truth of His Word to me.
First, we know that salvation is received by all in the same manner. Hebrews 11 is clear that the OT saints received salvation through their faith. This is confirmed in Hab. 2:4 and Eph. 2:8 and in Eph. 4:5 where it says: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.” What is interesting about this verse is that there are two Greek words which are translated into English as “one.” The first has more of a quantitative nature (“one, only”) and considered to be primarily a numeral. The second (used of “one baptism”) has the connotation of an ordinal. Thus, this verse is more correctly translated as “One Lord, one faith, the first baptism” leading the believer to assume that there is a second baptism, a second experience.
We know that not all OT saints were infilled with the Holy Spirit. Thus, while all had to be, by their faith, born of the Spirit into the Body of Christ, not all were infilled with the Holy Spirit for ministry.
Why is this?
First, we are told that the Holy Spirit could not come until Jesus was glorified. There is a dynamic in His glorification which allowed the Holy Spirit to be released in fullness to the saints. And this fulness had to do with the release of the Word in completeness to the Gentiles (Romans 11 and Eph. 3:19). We know that God had love for the Gentiles and allowed them to be saved in the OT because there are Gentiles who are accepted by faith: Rahab, Ruth and others. Therefore, there had to be another reason~~other than exclusion of the Gentiles~~why the lineage of Christ was increasingly restrictive.
Let’s look at the chronology of the promises of salvation. First, God promised that salvation would come through the line of Adam and Eve in His promise to Eve (Genesis 3:15). Then God promised that His salvation would come through Isaac, rejecting the line of Ishmael (Galatians 4:28). Then God promised that His salvation would come through Jacob, rejecting Esau. Then God promised that His salvation would come from the house of David, from Judah.
Why would God be more and more exclusionary? Because He had to show the world that only His way of salvation was acceptable. There were no other means through which salvation would be possible, but His way, and His way was through the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
So, we come back to the second, subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit. We know that salvation comes only by faith, either looking forward to (and not seeing) or looking backward to the cross. (And God counts the faith of the OT saints as greater than ours because they lived by faith, never receiving the promise in their lifetimes, yet still believing). And it is through this that we realize that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a different work in the life of the believer than that of salvation.
Then we must ask ourselves: why would God give to His church a new working of the Holy Spirit? I believe there are two reasons. First, it is for empowerment for it is through the baptism of the Holy Spirit that the gifts of the Spirit are released within the church and for signs and wonders to the unsaved. Second, it is because the gospel is now able to be released in “fulness” to the Gentiles. While it was opened to the Gentiles in the OT, the focus was not in the act of believers including the Gentiles. Now, the focus is on including the Gentiles into the church as the church itself takes on the promises of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.